Journey to the Virtual World

Monthly Archives: August 2016

Sunny Dua and Simon Eady have been doing a monthly webex where they are sharing their knowledge on VMware vRealize Operations. The latest one is coming this Friday, Thursday, 25th August. It’s 1:30 PM – 2:45 PM Singapore time. I know it’s not a good time for certain cities. If you cannot make it, it’s recorded.

I’ll join them in the next session. We are hoping to answer questions like the following. We put some answers in light hearted words as you know it’s a serious question.

We live in an era where society is hypersensitive to people who are not sensitive. In the example above, I use her but I meant her/his/him.

The session aims to help you monitoring performance and capacity. Hopefully, you gain a new perspective, and questions like the following will make sense:

Callum Eade and Kenon Owens created a program called Operationalize Your World. Sunny and I provide the technical content. Many folks, both internal and external, have reviewed the materials along the way in the past several years. I was cleaning up my files and surprised to see decks from early 2011 have the old versions of the slides you’re seeing today.

If you only have 10 minutes, below is a 7-minute introduction to what you get in the 1-day workshop. Sunny & I delivered that in VMworld 2016. We benefited a lot from the community, so we immediately said yes when Alastair and vBrownbag invited us to share.

In 2017, they again invited us. This time, we are given 30 minutes, so you get some of the solution this talk.

The 1-day workshop actually has 2-day worth of material. Hence there are flexibility on what is delivered on that day and it’s driven by the audience:

We use a restaurant analogy to raise awareness that your IaaS business should be operated differently. There are 4 main ppt files.

You can find the material here. They are in editable format (ppt), not in PDF format.

We are giving in PowerPoint as Operations vary widely. Take what’s relevant to you, throw away what’s not, add your custom deck, and make it yours. When you share your deck to your peers or customers, let me know how it goes. I’m keen to hear your journey. It’s a journey because it will take you multiple rounds to enlighten your peers.

The workshop covers 4 areas in management (Availability, Performance, Capacity and Configuration). We map each area to both Consumer and Provider layers of your IaaS business.

Hope you find the material useful. If you do, go back to the Main Page.

Steps (Details)

Follow the names exactly. They are hardcoded in the dashboards.
Names are Case Sensitive!
If you do not follow, import will work, but you get hourglass icon.

Part 1: Policy and Metrics

Import the policy. Choose Skip import to ensure nothing is overwritten. You will actually not overwrite anything as the file you import is a dummy policy. All it has is super metrics.

It should take around 1 minutes. You will get this when done.

The purpose of the policy import is to merely import the super metrics. We have to enable them manually. If you are curious the list of super metrics you are getting, the list looks something like this:

Once imported, enable the super metrics in your base policy. Yes, you can bulk enable by selecting multiple lines (as shown below). Use the Actions menu to enable them all.

After you import the Performance SLA super metrics, review their settings. Do adjust the SLA accordingly if you know the performance of your IaaS. If you are running Balance power management, change the CPU SLA to 10, 20, 30 accordingly.

Create 1 policy for each Tier. This has to be based on your active policy, so the inheritance works properly. In the example below, my base policy is called OneCloud Default Policy. Make sure you choose the right one.

You must use the following names for the Policy:

Tier 1

Tier 2

Tier 3

Enable the correct SLA for each tier. In the example below, I’m enabling Tier 2. From the big red number 1, you can see I’m editing a policy named Tier 2. You can see it’s being selected in the background, behind the dialog box.

See the big red number 2: It shows the Performance SLA that should belong to Tier 2. As a result, I only enabled them (see the big red number 3). The easiest is to specify “Tier 2” in the filter, so only Tier 2 super metrics are shown.

I do not enable the super metrics for Tier 1 (see the big red number 4).

Here is enable example, this time I’m using version 6.6:

Click Save to end the editing.

Part 2: Group Type and Group

Create these group types carefully:

Class of Service

VM Types

Tenants

Multi-tier Applications

Single-tier Applications

Application Tier

Your group import will fail if you do not have the group type.

If you mistyped and saved it, do not edit it to correct it. Delete it, and create a new one. The reason is the key wasn’t updated when you edit, only the label.

Once created, import the groups.

For the Service Tiers groups, you need to associate them to the correct policy. To do that, edit the group, and choose the respective policy. The following example shows for Tier 2.

Do the same steps for Tier 1 (Gold) and Tier 3 (Bronze).

BTW, you can also assign the policy to its associated group via the policy library. Your choice. Below is an example. Use the green plus sign, as I circle it below:

You know you got the policy associated when it appears in the Active Policies. The screenshot below show I’ve activated all 3 Tiers

Part 3: View and Dashboard

Import the view, then the dashboard. Choose Overwrite if you’re importing for the 2nd time, or have the old OYW views/dashboards.

The lists shown below is partial. There are >100 in total. I use View widget as they are flexible.

Import the Dashboards. You can import them in any order. When you are done, it looks something like this.

XML Files

Recreate the XML files. They cannot be imported. I use copy paste, even on the file names

Once imported, take your well deserved coffee break! It you have a large environment, it can take an hour for all the dashboards, super metrics, policies, groups, to be applied. During the process, you may see the known error while trying to open a dashboard. Just wait an hour or so.

When things go wrong

If your dashboard has hourglass icon, likely it’s because a metric or object is missing. The root cause is likely a missing group.

You should not need to do any of these things. But if things go wrong, there are a couple of things you can check. First, ensure each Policy actually applies to the correct object. For example, you can see below that I’ve applied the policy named Tier 2 to a group called Tier 2. Under the Assigned Groups, column, it shows it’s being applied to 1 group and it impacts 302 objects.

The same goes with super metrics. In the following example, a super metric is being applied to Tier 2 policy. It’s not applied to other policies, as it does not make sense.

If import fail, you will see the error message. Simply rename the duplicate object, then reimport.

You cannot re-import. The reason is the ID remains the same. Delete the existing object, then reimport. It is safeto delete.

Hope you find the material useful. If you do, go back to the Main Page. It gives you the big picture so you can see how everything fits together.